FIG. 4-4 Tomb effigies of (a) Eleanor of Aquitaine and (b) her son, Richard I (Lion-Heart), in the crypt of the Plantagenet kings
at the Abbey of Fontevrault, France.EX. 4-3 Richard Coeur-de-Lion (Lion-Heart), Ja nun hons pris (first verse)In its thirteenth-century sources Richard’s song is classified as a retrouenge, a term modern scholars
have not yet succeeded in defining. It may mean no more than a song in the vernacular rather than Latin,
but it probably has to do with the use of a concluding tag line or refrain. The form of the song will be
familiar with its initial melodic repetition or pes, producing the stanzaic pattern aab. We first encountered
it in the Salve Regina (it can be traced further back yet, all the way to the classical Greek ode), and we
will re-encounter it again and again in later repertories. The German guild poets called Meistersinger
(“master singers”; about them see below) finally gave it a name—“bar form”—in the fifteenth century,
and we might as well borrow it back from them to describe their forgotten model. (The term came from
the jargon of fencing, in which a bar or barat meant a well-aimed thrust.)
Eleanor’s trouvère great-grandson was Thibaut IV (1201–53), Count of Champagne and King of
Navarre in what are now the Spanish Pyrenees. He was one of the most prolific of the French noble poets
at the very height of their activity. His grandmother, Countess Marie of Champagne, Eleanor’s daughter by
her first marriage, was the patron of Gace Brulé (ca. 1160–sometime after 1213), the first great trouvère,
from whom Thibaut may have begun to learn his craft. Between them Gace and Thibaut turned out 110
songs with surviving music (62 and 48 respectively; of course these numbers reflect the much higher
general survival rate among trouvère songs compared with those of the troubadours). Thibaut’s De bone
amour vient seance et bonté (“From love all wisdom and goodness come”) expresses the conventional,
by now somewhat hackneyed if elegant sentiments of fine amours (to use the French variant of the phrase)